Powers of Congress: Poems

Powers Of Congress exhibits, in dazzling language and complex rhetorical structures, a passionate curiosity about all aspects of modern American life. With a linguistic vigor and intellectual depth that are rare in contemporary poetry, Fulton illuminates such fundamental subjects as war, religion, gender, our obsession with bodily or mechanistic perfection, and the perplexing chasm of consciousness that lies between the natural world and what we humans do. These poems are equally daring in their formal inventions; their textual layerings range from acrostics to a dramatic monologue inscribed with readers responses. Sven Birkerts, in the Boston Review, called Fulton a prodigiously gifted poet, and in Powers Of Congress Fulton more than meets that claim. This thrilling collection, destined to exert a wide influence upon contemporary poetics, will surely intoxicate all those who love the erotic involvement of language with thought.